Tuesday, September 6, 2011

It crept up on me like a thief in the night, or a sneaky little brother, or a basset hound that sees a child with a cookie in their hand from behind...all the same, it crept up and I didn't give it permission to pounce on me like it did. What is this malicious "it" that I speak of?

The realization that I am getting old.

Not wrinkly, aged, and crotchety old. Not prune-juice loving, cracking back, and purple tinted hair old. No. This is a very different old.

Its when the door greeter at a restaurant doesn't just "assume" and bring you a child's menu with a handful of crayons or even ask if you're young enough to want one. Its when all the people you refer to as "little kids" are only two inches shorter than you and you better savor that much cause their about to hit another growth spurt. And all those people you thought were just "big kids" are actually all grown up, settled, married with several children, probably getting ready to celebrate their tenth anniversary. And all the people you're friends with are thisclose to getting married, having children, and being all grown up themselves. Its when you still find yourself thinking of high school as being a HUGE grown up thing to do and then you realize you're painfully close to being done with it.

Yeah.

That kind of old.

When life seems to start coming at you in big 6-month chunks instead of day by day. The sun rises and sets much quicker than it used to...doesn't it?

I have had to come to grips with the fact that when Scripture says life is a fleeting vapor...

that wasn't a figure of speech.

"If I had a minute for every hour that I've wastedI'd be rich in time. Yep, I'd be doing fine.| Jack Johnson |

And when my parents say that every 15 years comes way faster than the last...

I gulp in horror cause now I believe them.

"I used to want time to run so quickly,but now crawling is fine.Cause the older I get, I see I need every momentto let my roots grow down deep."| Jillian Edwards |

Late teens and early twenties can be filled with so much jittery excitement and taste of adventure. But are we too busy scheming, planning, and dreaming that we forget to really live.Do we forget to smile because we're thinking about future happiness? Do we forget to love those around us because we're day-dreaming about that certain someone that will sweep us off our feet one day in that glorious real-life romance that we believe will be ours? Do we forget to see things through someone else's eyes because we're caught up in insisting on having things go our way?

Aviator and horse eye reflections aside, I have had to be aware that I am a certain someone in God's eyes. I am bought with a price, an inheritance for Him, a child of the King, an ambassador for Christ! Am I living up to that? Or am I too wrapped up in how impressive, cool, epic, fun, or awesome I appear before the world?

In a hundred years or even a thousand years, is it really gonna matter what I was "in to" that made me so "in"? Not quite.But when I step down from my false sense of a pedestal, tone down my urgent pleas for recognition, snap out of the day dreams of what I hope and in a way demand my future will be...it is then that I see how glorious my Savior is and how great a sinner I truly am.And I see that, among other countless sins, it is that very false view of how wonderful I imagine myself to be that He has saved me from.

6 comments:

Thank you Allix! I seriously needed to read that this morning! Especially "Do we forget to smile because we're thinking about future happiness? Do we forget to love those around us because we're day-dreaming about that certain someone that will sweep us off our feet one day in that glorious real-life romance that we believe will be ours? Do we forget to see things through someone else's eyes because we're caught up in insisting on having things go our way?"With love from a (sister) photographer~Rebekah